Dan Simmons' first published story, "The River Styx Runs Upstream," won the Rod Serling Memorial Award in 1982. His first novel, Song of Kali won the 1986 World Fantasy Award. His first horror novel, Carrion Comfort, won the Bram Stoker Award. His first science fiction novel, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award. Since then his work has included contemporary literary fiction (Phases of Gravity and Entropy's Bed at Midnight), psychological suspense/horror (Summer of Night and Fires of Eden), two collections of shorter fiction (Prayers to Broken Stones and LoveDeath) and completion of his four-volume Hyperion Cantos. Simmons' most recent novel, a literary-mystery-espionage novel titled The Crook Factory, was published in Spring 1999. His next book, Darwin's Blade, is scheduled for Summer 2000. He recently completed work on a screenplay for a film version of his novel Children of the Night, and is currently working on a novel titled The Hounds of Winter.

Born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948, he grew up in various cities in the Midwest, including Brimfield, Illinois, which is the source of his fictional "Elm Haven" in Summer of Night. He received a B.A. in English from Wabash College in 1970, and his Masters in Education from Washington University in St. Louis in 1971. He worked in elementary education for 18 years and was a finalist for Colorado Teacher of the Year. His last four years of teaching were spent creating, coordinating, and teaching in APEX, a gifted/talented program serving 19 elementary schools and some 15,000 potential students. In 1995, Wabash College awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contributions in education and writing. Dan has been a full-time writer since 1987 and lives in Longmont, Colorado with his wife, Karen, his daughter, Jane, and their Pembroke Welsh Corgie, Fergie.

Currently the editor of Event Horizon: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Ellen Datlow earned her reputation for encouraging and developing a whole generation of fiction writers as fiction editor of OMNI Magazine & OMNI Internet. Datlow is responsible for discovering and publishing some of the biggest names in the SF, fantasy, and horror genres today including William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, Stephen King, Jack Cady, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates, and Peter Straub. She has been co-editor (with Terri Windling) of the six Snow White, Blood Red adult fairy tale anthologies. She has been editing the horror half (with Terri) of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror for thirteen years. She and Terri also co-edited Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, an erotic fantasy anthology. Solo, she is the editor of many anthologies including: BLOOD IS NOT ENOUGH, Off Limits, Little Deaths, Lethal Kisses, Twists of the Tale, and the soon to be published Vanishing Acts, an "endangered species" anthology. She is tied for winning the most World Fantasy Awards in the award's history (five) and has received multiple Hugo Award nominations for Best Editor.

Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University. In 1986, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and won Lambda Literary Awards in 1996 and 1995 for Shadow Man and Trouble and Her Friends, having previously been a three-time finalist (for Mighty Good Road, Dreamships, and Burning Bright). Trouble and Her Friends was also shortlisted for the Tiptree Award. Her most recent novel, The Jazz, will be available from Tor Books in the summer of 2000, and Point of Dreams, a new project with long-time co-author Lisa A. Barnett, will be out in the fall. Her first work of non-fiction, Conceiving the Heavens: Creating the Science Fiction Novel, was published by Heinemann in 1997. She lives in New Hampshire with her partner of twenty years.

Charles Grant is the best selling author of over a hundred books including X-Files: Whirlwind and X-Files: Goblins, and The Nestling. His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines such as Amazing and Analog. He has won two Nebula Awards and two World Fantasy Awards for writing, and served as Regional Director of the SFWA. He also won the World Fantasy Award for editing the highly acclaimed Shadows anthology series, and edited many other anthologies including Gallery of Horror, Nightmares, and Horrors. He is currently in the midst of two ongoing series, the Black Oak horror line including Genesis, and Winter Knight, and Millennium Quartet, consisting of Symphony, In the Mood, and Chariot so far. He lives with his wife, Kathryn Ptacek, in New Jersey.

Barry B. Longyear is the first writer to win the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in the same year. In addition to his acclaimed Enemy Mine series, from which the motion picture of the same name was derived, his works include numerous short stories, two Alien Nation tie-ins, the "Circus World" series, the "Infinity Hold" series, and novels ranging from Sea Of Glass to The God Box. His recent works include The Enemy Papers (all three novels of the Enemy Mine series, including the never-before published The Last Enemy and the Drac bible, The Talman) and Yesterday's Tomorrow: Recovery Meditations for Hard Cases. He has recently completed training in becoming a private investigator and is currently writing a murder mystery titled The Hangman's Son. He resides with his wife, Jean, in New Sharon, Maine.

Debra Doyle was born in Florida and educated in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania -- the last at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her doctorate in English literature, concentrating on Old English poetry. While living and studying in Philadelphia, she met and married her collaborator, James D. Macdonald. Macdonald was born in White Plains, New York in 1954. He passed through the University of Rochester where he learned that a degree in Medieval Studies wouldn't fit him for anything. As an enlisted Boatswain's Mate in the Navy, and later as an officer, he saw the world. As the famous Yog Sysop, Macdonald ran the Science Fiction and Fantasy RoundTable on GEnie for two years ('91 to '93), where they are both still active. Doyle teaches fiction writing at the Computer Assisted Learning Center (CALC) on line. The two live in a big 19th-Century house in Colebrook, New Hampshire where they collaborate in writing science fiction and fantasy books such as The Stars Asunder, Groogleman, and the award-winning Knight's Wyrd, for children, teenagers, and adults. When they aren't writing, they coach and judge "Odyssey of the Mind" teams for their local school, lead a Brownie troop, and do other neat stuff.